Some medications -- particularly those to treat cancer -- have been derided for years for destroying healthy cells along with those they are trying to eradicate. Sometimes they cause more harm than good to the patients receiving them. This scenario has inspired researchers to develop more targeted drugs to affect only diseased cells or areas of the body, rather than the body as a whole.

Medical experts believe these so-called intelligent drug delivery systems -- still mainly in the research and clinical trial stages -- will be the standard of care one day for things like cancer, diabetes, and gastrointestinal disorders.

This graphic shows the development roadmap for Accurins, an intelligent drug delivery technology developed by Bind Therapeutics. Accurins are polymeric nanoparticles that carry medications into the bloodstream and are designed to have prolonged circulation so they can target only the diseased parts of the body, controlling the timing and release of drugs delivered to those areas.

"When we administer something intravenously, the entire body is being exposed to this drug," Mary Caldorera-Moore, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Louisiana Technical University researching intelligent drug delivery, told us. "For example, with chemotherapy drugs, they are very harsh" on the body. Moreover, research has shown that many times only about 20% of a drug administered is effective at treating a condition; a lot of the medication that goes into someone's body is wasted or misused.

Intelligent drug delivery -- which can target an area of the body and administer only the needed dosage -- can change all this. "We can improve the efficiency of the drug if we can get it locally to where we need it -- where the disease is. We can use less of the drug, driving the cost down, and the patient won't have as many side effects."

Research leaders
Caldorera-Moore previously worked at the University of Texas under Nicholas Peppas, a prominent biomedical and chemical engineer who has been working for about 30 years on an intelligent drug delivery system based on hydrogels. Peppas is seen as a leader and authority in drug delivery research.

The idea is to design materials to respond to environmental cues inside the human body to target the diseased areas without harming other parts of the body, Caldorera-Moore said. "We are developing these materials to be pH responsive, temperature responsive, or biomolecule responsive. What we mainly focus on is molding them into nanoparticles or microparticles so they can taken orally or injected." pH refers to the level of acidity in an aqueous solution or environment -- in this case, the human body. These medications would replace intravenous drugs that are still widely used to treat things like diabetes and cancer, making the treatments more tolerable and effective. "The entire goal is to increase patient compliance and success."

For example, biomolecule-responsive hydrogels can be loaded with drugs that would not be released until they come into contact with "markers that let them know they are in a tumor environment," such as enzymes associated with cancerous cells.

I have been reminded of this story because of a slideshow I recently did about technologies that make us super human: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=272872

Intelligent drug delivery was one of them. I think some of these new innovations hold great promise, especially for patients of cancer and other diseases with very harsh treatments. I wathced my mother suffer with cancer and during the last few weeks of her life she was very tired and had very little quality of life due to the drugs she was taking (that didn't work anyway). If we could focus drug delivery at least people receiving treatment might not feel the negative side effects and can do some of the things they enjoy doing, even if the treatment ultimately does not work.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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